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On actor-network theory

Page history last edited by Michael J 8 years ago

On actor-network theory. A few

clarifications plus more than a few complications - Latour http://bit.ly/21CFBxR

Nemes pulled from the article
Although it is called a “theory”, ANT does not usually explain “why” or "how" a network takes the form that it does.^[3] Rather, ANT is a way of thoroughly exploring the relational ties within a network (which can be a multitude of different things). As Latour notes,^[4] "explanation does not follow from description; it is description taken that much further." It is not, in other words, a theory "of" anything, but rather a method, or a "how-to book" as Latour ^[3] puts it. The approach is related to other versions of material-semiotics (notably the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucaultand feminist scholar Donna Haraway).	Rhizomes: Issue 21: Dennis Mischke http://bit.ly/1Pwyv78 a concept that has witnessed a rising popularity is the one of assemblages. Coined by Deleuze and Guattari, the term has repeatedly been invoked to describe novel forms of convocation and collaboration but also of disjunction and (social and cultural) apartheid (DeLanda, 1997, 2002, 2006; Rabinow, 2003; Ong & Collier, 2004; Hayles, 2006; Sassen, 2006). In this paper I want to pick up on this work in an attempt to connect two discourses in which the question of togetherness is pivotal and in which the concept of assemblages can be put to work: the discourse on cosmopolitanism and the discourse on new materialism
Abstract : Three resources have been developped over the ages to deal with agencies. The first one is to attribute to them naturality and to link them with nature. The second one is to grant them sociality and to tie them with the social fabric. The third one is to consider them as a semiotic construction and to relate agency with the building of meaning. The originality of science studies comes from the impossibility of clearly differentiating those three resources. Microbes, neutrinos of DNA are at the same time natural, social and discourse. They are real, human and semiotic entities in the same breath. The article explores the consequence of this peculiar situation which has not been underlined before science studies forced us to retie the links between these three resources. The actor-network theory developed by Callon and his colleagues is an attempt to invent a vocabulary to deal with this new situation. The article reviews those difficulties and tries ot overcome them by showing how they may be used to account for the consturction of entities, that is for the attribution of nature, society and meaning.	"Meaning" is necessary because living things have to make decisions every minute. It is impossible to be secure in a decision if one does not have a picture of the "meaning" of a situation. Every interpretation of meaning includes a picture of one's self. Every interpretation of meaning involves a self image. Self worth is part of any meaning that includes the person as having agency. Microbes, neutrinos of DNA are at the same time natural, social and discourse. They are real, human and semiotic entities in the same breath. As are Nemes.
Semiotics is a necessary step in this venture since when you bracket out the question of reference and that of the social conditions of productions -that Nature “out there” and Society “up there”- what remains is, in a first approximation, meaning production, or discourse, or, text. This is the major achievement of the sixties and of their “linguistic turn” or “semiotic turn”. Instead of being means of communications between human actors and nature, meaning productions became the only important thing to study.	Meaning Production can be taken as a well bounded nemTube. Well bounded means semi permeable. Permeable to allow new energy to pass in and out. Not permeable enough to maintain coherence in a changing environment.
First, the granting of humanity to an individual actor, or the granting of collectivity, or the granting of anonymity, of a zoomorphic appearance, of amorphousness, of materiality, requires paying the same semiotic price. The effects will be different, the genres will be different, but not the work of attributing, imputing, distributing action, competences, performances and relations.	The conjecture is those mechanisms and more can be described at the highest levels by Notice or Not, Engage or Not, Mull or Not, Exchange or Not.
Second, actors are not conceived as fixed entities but as flows, as circulating objects, undergoing trials, and their stability, continuity, isotopies has to be obtained by other actions and other trials	Actors are conceived as flows At minimum its necessary to see a triad of flows. In fact to begin to understand material phenomena there can be many flows that interact.
Finally, from semiotics is kept the crucial practice to grant texts and discourses the ability to define also their context, their authors -in the text-, their readers -in fabula- and even their own demarcation and metalangage. All the problems of the analyst are shifted to the “text itself” without ever being allowed to escape into the context	The text is a neme that triggers cascades of emotion and cognition. A neme also embodies cascades or emotion and cognition into a clear observable. The patterns of nemetic flow gives us the lens with which we can see what should be seen.
it is a method to describe the deployment of associations like semiotics is a method to describe the generative path of any narration. It does not say anything about the shape of entities and actions, but only what the recording device should be that would allow entities to be described in all their details. AT places the burden of theory on the recording not on the specific shape that is recorded.
But a semiotics of things is easy, one simply has to drop the meaning bit from semiotics... If one now translates semiotics by path-bulding, or ordermaking, or creation of directions, one does not have to specify if it is language or objects one is analyzing. Such a move gives a new continuity to practices that were deemed different when one dealt with language and “symbols” or with skills, work and matter. This move can be said either to elevate things to the dignity of texts or to elevate texts to the ontological status of things. What really matters is that it is an elevation instead of a reduction and that the new hybrid status give to all entities both the action, variety and circulating existence recognized in the study of textual characters and also the reality, solidity, externality that was recognized in things “out of” our representations. What is lost is the absolute distinction between representation and things -but such is exactly what AT wishes to redistribute through what I call a counter-copernican revolution.	a semiotics of things Nemetics, grounded in the semiotics of things, is uniquely situation to describe the Internet of Things. one does not have to specify if it is language or objects one is analyzing is at the heart of Nemetics. A word, paragraph, nation state, person, are all subsumed in the category Neme.
No net exists independently of the very act of tracing it, and no tracing is done by an actor exterior to the net. A network is not a thing but the recorded movement of a thing. The questions AT addresses have now changed. It is not longer whether a net is representation or a thing, a part of society or a part of discourse or a part of nature, but what moves and how this movement is recorded.
If choosing words for the network-tracing activity has to be done, quasi-objects (Serres, ) or tokens might be the best candidate so far. It is crucial for the definition of the term that what circulates and what makes the circulation be both co-determined and transformed.	Nemes are tokens of energy, information and materiality.

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